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Jean Béliveau, the legendary, brilliant Montreal Canadiens centreman whose grace and leadership on and off the ice transcended hockey for more than six decades, died Tuesday night the Montreal Canadiens announced on Twitter.

As a scorching summer surrendered to a drizzly Vancouver fall 100 years ago, news from the war in Europe plastered newspaper front pages. Yet the small rites of everyday life continued across British Columbia.

About 2:30 a.m. on May 29, 1914, the Canadian Pacific steamship Empress of Ireland collided with the Norwegian collier (coal ship) The Storstad on the St. Lawrence River near Rimouski, Quebec. Fourteen minutes later, the Empress of Ireland sank, killing 1,012 people. A century later, it remains the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history.

Our oceans are in crisis; there is no way to soften this news. When you live in a city, it’s easy to ignore what climate change, over-fishing, ocean pollution, human population expansion and acidification are doing to our oceans and to the creatures that live in them. More than 80 per cent of Canadians live in cities today; they have very little connection to the natural world. YouTube videos and big-screen TVs are not an adequate substitute. If we fail to inspire the next generation, to capture their imaginations and motivate them to act, we risk losing it all. It’s time to think of the big picture.

The painstaking job of recovering the remains of those who died when fire, whipped by fierce winds, roared through the Residence du Havre in this Lower St. Lawrence village is being complicated by thick ice and the collapse of the three-storey building.

OTTAWA — The federal government, reportedly poised to reverse a decision to close a marine rescue station in Quebec City due to public pressure, should also listen to West Coast complaints and bring back the Kitsilano rescue station, the New Democratic Party argued Thursday. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is ignoring B.C. public complaints while Conservative MPs in the Lower Mainland have “gone silent,” Fin Donnelly, MP for New Westminster-Coquitlam and Port Moody, argued during question period.

A threat by a B.C. First Nation to shut down a B.C. mine is a small sign of a potentially “catastrophic” uprising in Canada if Aboriginal Peoples don’t become full participants in natural resource extraction, a prominent think-tank warned Wednesday.

Before he became a Mohawk chief, Serge Simon sold cigarettes. He won’t say who supplied him with native tobacco and insists it isn’t his business to know what customers did with the product once he sold it to them. During his time in an industry where police raids, lawsuits and jail are par for the course, Simon came to value discretion.

VICTORIA — When Ombudsman Jay Chalke was handed the job of investigating those botched firings in the health ministry this week, he offered multiple assurances to the public that his office would do its best to get to the bottom of the murky affair. “I am committed to a diligent and professional investigation into this matter,” he vowed in a statement issued by his office after a legislature committee referred the matter to him.